The Next Grisly Attack

The news about the trial getting underway for the two “religion of peace” ambassadors who hacked and stabbed British soldier Lee Rigby to death, almost decapitating him in broad daylight after hitting/running him over with a car on a London street last May, reminds me that we are living our lives nowadays amidst an almost constant barrage of sensational violence streaming in from all around the globe via a surfeit of media.

It seems as though the breathing spaces between horrific school shootings and various other rampage massacres, terror bombings, and so forth are getting shorter and closer together.  I even wonder if in the process of writing this article, news might break of another outrageous spree attack somewhere…

Where…?  When…?  We all know it’s coming.  We all know the next one will be fairly soon, and will be of sufficient scale and/or carnage to grab and rivet the attention of media producers and audiences until the crisis and discussion fallout are spent.  Then, maybe a breathing space, or maybe not so much of a breathing space, until the next one.

Of course, there are the typical Islamic acts of terrorism and the crazed school/campus shooters to which we’ve grown grimly and unfortunately familiar.  We can profile and try to red-flag the jihad “sleepers” and the headcase ticking time-bombs among the population who are most prone to launch, but also of course there the less typical Christopher Dorners, Timothy McVeighs, and Aaron Alexises who explode in frenzied violence onto the panorama every so often.

I just happened to notice that it seems like it’s been a little while since the last sensational terror attack/ghastly massacre on our soil or in a foreign country which came to dominate our Western news sources.

Lately, what is actually a long-existing pattern of low-level, racially-motivated black mob violence has come to the fore, especially what is known as the sometimes deadly “knockout game,” but the absence of a singular, headline-grabbing, sensationally atrocious incident (since perhaps the admittedly relatively minor vehicular rampage/police shooting of Miriam Carey on Capitol Hill two months ago)  makes me wonder what’s about to pop.  Not to be morbid or anything, it’s just the way things have gotten to be.

We have become rather numbed to the somewhat regular reports of car bombs killing dozens in Iraq and Pakistan, and to the even more regular stream of gangland gun slayings of dozens by the many sons of Obama on any given weekend in Chicago and in other American cities.

It takes a somewhat special kind of incident to really jolt the already jaded miasma of the public’s fascination with abomination, along the lines of last April’s Boston Marathon bombings, the Sandy Hook massacre, and of course the infamous 9/11 attacks.  The fact that evil plotters take this into account and exploit it in their calculated rampages makes it especially important to cultivate “situational awareness” when going into public areas which may be targets for terrorism or other sensational criminal acts.

The Christmas season, unfortunately, adds another feature of necessary awareness.  I know I really don’t have to explain why.

If I could predict what’s going to happen, when, and where, I’d be issuing much more specific warnings.  But it does seem to me to be worth pointing out the probability of some sort of awfulness in the offing.  Be vigilant.